When I was a kid, and bought dictionnaries for school, the first thing I did was to look up four letter words, to check that they actually were there, and what they meant.
Internet is, after all, a humongous dictionnary, and now you can look up as many four letter words as you want. And, since you can look
within books in
Amazon.com, well, why not try it.
First try:
the most famous four letter word. It returns 11624 results. Not too bad. Try now
sleep. Six times as much.
I am not sure what that means. The most straighforward interpretation is that people write six times as much about sleeping than about fucking. Not the idea I had about literature, to be sure. "And then we went to sleep" is much weaker, literarywise, than "...And then we had a good fuck". I'm not sure, either, that people actually sleep six times as much as they make love.
Next step might be to program a "literary mindshare tool", à la
Google Share. Anybody up for it?
